First time poster here but I've been lurking for a while...
I attended this as my significant other and I love horror/halloween events. The slow decline of HHN into the child-friendly mess it is now has led us to spend more time/money on other local offerings. Here's what we thought:
Firstly, the venue is totally awful, for a myriad of reasons.
- Getting to the venue is a little weird. You pay $20 to park in a shopping center about a mile or two down the road. Then, you board one of many constantly running charter buses, giving you the complete Greyhound bus experience. When you're heading in you feel like you're on a school field trip, and when you're on the bus getting a ride back to your car, you feel like you're on a party bus because everybody's loud and drunk and you're stuck with them. Not a big deal, but it's ... just weird.
- Once you arrive at the hotel via their charter bus, you now have to walk past the hotel lobby and on to the side of the hotel, where you can now take your second mode of transportation -- a golf cart to the back parking lot of the hotel where the event is. Or, you can just walk the length of the hotel to the venue, since there's only like 2 golf carts and they only hold about 4 people each.
- I do not know why they chose to post up in a hotel parking lot but it's not immersive at all. No attempt was made to obscure the hotel while you're in the event, and you're constantly being gawked at by hotel guests who have walked over to the presumably vacant hotel tower to watch the event from above.
- The restrooms are inside the hotel food court. You have to get a stamp on your arm (and hope it doesn't wipe off from sweat or washing your hands) in order to enter/exit the event to go to the food court, and then you need to mingle with the regular hotel guests, which is just weird, with kids and whatnot running around after leaving a house where a serial killer wants to "murder" you.
Food/drink on offer
Food is OK, typical spread of options (burger, chicken sandwich) but they just feel a little "cheap", like a step below Six Flags. No signature treats other than the pulled pork in a Cheetos bag thing from the west coast. They did have a alligator gumbo which my significant other tried and we both agreed it was not that great.
Drinks are strong enough, they don't skimp too much, and priced less than theme parks would charge.
I tried all of their specialty drinks and didn't really like any of them. I ended up falling back on standard cocktails after trying them all, which was OK but it would have been nice if they had some really great signature drinks. Maybe their staff is still learning how to mix them but they all tasted a bit off, like you could sort of taste what they were going for, but it wasn't quite there. I guess the best of the bunch was their butterbeer/apple vodka cocktail.
Houses
Set design and lighting is very well done. Not quite at the level of HHN's set design, maybe a step or two below. My biggest complaint is that nearly all of them had some sort of staircase in them, which is not themed at all, so seeing a black and silver wood/steel staircase in the middle of a "swamp" is just weird. They could have themed them a little bit I think. I also don't know if they have a shortcut around the stairs for wheelchair/accessibility purposes but I didn't see it, and there wasn't any attendants at those points, so I doubt it.
Scares are decent. I got scared more in the three houses here than at all of the houses at HHN this year, so that's good I guess. The nice thing they do is they send you in small groups, so there isn't a constant stream of people going through. You have plenty of time to stop and absorb the scenery, and put space in between you and the people in front of you, so that the scare actors can reset and get you (if you want).
Unlike some of the other local haunts we've done, though, if you are with someone and you're not in the front, then you will rarely get scared. You'll watch the scares happen to the person in front of you, but rarely will a scare actor you didn't see come from behind (or the side) and get you.
I also don't know what they plan to do if the weather decides to pull a Florida and rain in the evening. There are outdoor sections in every house, with scare actors out there. Either those sections will be devoid of actors or they have hired some people who don't mind standing in the pouring rain for any number of minutes/hours.
Shows
They offer two shows which seem to happen continuously every 30 minutes or so. They are interesting but nothing unique. One is a fire eater/twirler show with two to three characters doing various things with fire hula hoops and other apparatus. The other show is a silks/acrobatics show with one to two girls.
Value
Don't buy at the event. They rip you off completely. The tickets are so much cheaper online, via Groupon or Costco or wherever else they are selling them. At the event they even charge you a service fee and I've been told they employ variable pricing based on the popularity of the event so you may end up paying more than what is posted at the gate. Overall for what we paid on Groupon it was definitely worth it.
"Streetmosphere"
Honestly the scare actors roaming around will scare you/get you more than those in the houses. They are very good and after a few minutes you'll learn that you need to start looking over your shoulder since you don't know when it's going to happen. They're very aggressive and unpredictable. It's awesome.
Issues
I don't know if it will get busier as Halloween approaches, but there was at least 300-400 people at the event when we were there, and none of the houses had a queue, ever. I think, being a new event in Orlando and all, they may have gotten very far ahead of themselves selling the express/fast pass options, as there is absolutely no need for them, and they would need more people than they could even fit into that parking lot for their queues to be full at more than one house. Until they switch venues I don't think they will ever need the express pass option at this event. I don't know if they knew that or not, but it smells of cash grab to me.
You might have heard that they built a secret bar into one of the haunts. It's quite easy to find because there is an attendant standing outside the door to the bar within the house, and people are always interacting with said person, being told "no". In order to enter the secret bar, you have to obtain a coin. You can obtain a coin by interacting with scare actors, bartenders, or by embarking on a treasure hunt of sorts. I knew this information upon arriving at the event so I was in go mode from the start. I interacted and spoke to every scare actor. I spoke at length with the bartenders and continued to use the same group of bartenders. All of the actors & bartenders that had coins were "out of coins" by the time I had either asked or they informed me since they could tell I was interacting often to get a coin.
The other route to get a coin is to earn one yourself by doing a scavenger hunt.
This is implemented poorly and was not playtested. The procedure is basically to get one thing from one house (or area around the house), to then give to someone in another area, to then give to a roaming actor, etc, etc, until you get a guaranteed coin. We found the first item (a "scroll" from the pirate ship area) and walked around for at least an hour and a half showing it to everybody we could find and they all told us another hint, or told us that they weren't the right person at all. After 2 hours of searching, we were finally told, after showing the scroll to at least 30 different actors/employees, that we had the completely wrong item. The "scroll" we found was just a prop that was not meant for us to take, and the real "scroll" was located just a few feet away from it, hidden under a place where people are constantly sitting. I have no idea how you are supposed to figure this out, and that is only step one. Once we found the place where the real "scroll" was, it was an hour until the event ended, and we were then told that there was no more real "scrolls" for the night as there is only a finite amount of them. So, we never made it into the secret bar. Keep in mind, after doing all of this work and spending the entire event doing a scavenger hunt, you still have to pay them money for drinks in said secret bar. It's not like, free drinks or anything. It's a little bit too hard and long. I get that they want it to be exclusive, but you can just pay your way in with a more expensive ticket, so it's not really exclusive is it? It was packed from the start of the event (you can see into it from inside the house it's located in).
We saw one couple skip two steps of the scavenger hunt since they ended up showing the right thing to the correct actor who happened to be the end of the hunt. Somehow they got the item for the end of the hunt from someone/somewhere & the actor was a little confused but gave them a coin anyway. They were totally clueless that they had skipped steps.
Once we hit a wall with the treasure hunt we decided to stop giving them any more of our money and left 15 minutes before the event ended, to go back and wait for a bus with all the other drunk people, to wait for the requisite 20 minutes until the bus disembarks, to start the ride back to our car.
I hope they succeed, I really do, but they have a lot of things they need to fix.